New student program could help ease the crushing bail burden on Ottawa's jail

Queen's Legal Aid review council Jodie-Lee Primeau, left, along with Queen's University law students Olga Michtchouk and William McDiarmid at the Queen's University Law Clinics in Kingston, Ont.Julia McKay / Julia McKay/The Whig-Standard

An innovative new program in Kingston that helps women get released on bail while easing pressure on the local jail could offer a potential solution for overcrowding in other provincial detention centres like Ottawa.

The bail program being offered by Queen’s Legal Aid in partnership with the Elizabeth Fry Society has law students stepping in to help impoverished offenders who are behind bars, usually because they lack a plan that includes the housing or bail supervision they need to be released. The students meet with the inmates, then help craft a release plan that usually assists them in finding a place to stay, counselling, or addiction treatment that the inmate’s lawyer can present to court to help secure their release.

The students have been able to help secure the release of 11 women from the Quinte Detention Centre since launching the program in June, said lawyer Jodie-Lee Primeau, the program’s supervisor. Ten of the women were released on consent of the Crown prosecutor without a bail hearing.

It had a significant impact on overcrowding in the women’s wing at the Napanee jail, according to Primeau.

When the program first started, there were 29 female inmates in an area that only had 19 beds, Primeau said. All of the women were being held on remand awaiting trial. As of mid-October, there were only nine women still in the unit.

“They were triple-bunked and sleeping under metal tables,” said Primeau.

The program comes as Ontario’s bail system has been increasingly criticized for being too risk-averse, which leads to overcrowding in provincial jails. A task force on overcrowding at the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre recommended finding new ways to get vulnerable people who could otherwise be released out of jail.

Ontario’s attorney general is expected to announce a plan for bail reform before the end of the year to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the system.

Primeau said she believes the program’s model could be employed in other cities with law schools and provincial detention centres.

Blair Crew, a lawyer with the University of Ottawa Community Legal Clinic, said he thinks the program could work in Ottawa if it had the appropriate funding. Crew said Ottawa has a more heavily-staffed duty counsel office and a larger amount of defence lawyers available to conduct bail hearings, but feels it would be a useful service given the success they’ve had in Kingston.

Primeau hopes Queen’s can secure additional funding and access to the detention centre (currently they only receive access to female inmates due to their partnership with the Elizabeth Fry Society) so they can expand their program to assist male offenders.

Kingston defence lawyer Dawn Quelch said the program not only lets students see “behind the curtain” of criminal law, it helps ease pressure on jails while reducing the burden on lawyers and the courts.

Quelch said the program is benefitting both the justice system and the public.

“There is the obvious economics of it. It is cheaper to have somebody in the community than it is to have them incarcerated,” she said.

Having someone who would otherwise be sitting in jail out in the community engaging with services that address what keeps bringing them before the court could help reduce risk of that person reoffending, she added.

Quelch said many of these inmates end up serving time until they get to what the Crown is looking for, then plead guilty and go home “without having addressed an addiction problem, a mental health problem, a developmental delay issue, untreated whatever,” she said. “They are going to go right back into the milieu they came out of. They are further behind than they are before and we have not done anything to assist them.”

Primeau said the students get hands-on practical experience working with real clients, while the lawyers – many of which only receive a set amount of about $300 for bail hearings from Legal Aid Ontario – save time and get their clients released quickly. Oftentimes the clients are impoverished, so making the contacts they need with community agencies or potential sureties is difficult from behind bars, where just making a phone call can be a challenge.

“This bail background really gives me an enhanced understanding of this systemic problem that we have and how it’s gone ignored, got swept under the carpet,” said Olga Michtchouk, a second-year law student.

“Some people are in there simply because they don’t have the funds or the resources or the social background to get them out,” added William McDiarmid, an articling student at Queen’s Law Clinic.

Michtchouk said law students “should have this rounded knowledge of the reality of the criminal justice system that it’s not necessarily there to prevent violent criminals on the outside wreaking havoc, it’s often just poor, marginalized people being detained because they have an unfortunate history and they are just stuck and they can’t get out.”

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